Filed Under:Wilderness Heart

A great new interview with Black Mountain’s Steve McBean has been posted to Pitchfork. He talks about the recording process of Wilderness Heart, falling in love with a California girl and the two producers behind the new album. The shark remains a mystery, but for how long?

Black Mountain’s third LP, Wilderness Heart, was built on the west coast of America, in part at London Bridge Studios in Seattle with producer Randall Dunn (Boris, Sunn O))), Kinski) and predominantly in Hollywood at Sunset Sound with producer Dave Sardy (Oasis, Wolfmother, LCD Soundsystem).

Each studio’s environs and producer had a great impact on what was recorded there – the LA sessions having a free and summery vibe and the ones in Seattle a chillier, more claustrophic feeling.

The new record is packed with succinct rock songs that pulse and pound with startling precision: it pummels you, you ask for more. Wilderness Heart is arguably Black Mountain’s tightest, most concentrated outing, but there’s still plenty of raw rock energy at work. It’s their most metal and most folk oriented record so far. It’s a Black Mountain pop record, which is to say it’s nothing like pop at all.

The band cites a slew of disparate influences – New Order, King Crimson, Studio 54, Alex Chilton, sunshine, Janis Joplin, Please Kill Me, Shirley Collins, Mickey Newbury, jalapeno salsa, Night of The Hunter, Cactus Taqueria, Funky16Corners podcasts, Dennis Wilson, the house blowing up in the desert at the end of Zabriskie Point – but, as keyboard player Jeremy Schmidt points out, “Who knows how these things connect with the holistic mix of often dissonant forces that become Black Mountain?

Wilderness Heart will be released on September 14th in the US and September 13th in the UK.